Special report: A record surge of more than 78 million salmon returned this summer to Bristol Bay amid a warming climate. But will the rising heat disrupt future runs? Produced in partnership with seattletimes and PulitzerCenter.
Published:This story was reported as part of a collaboration between the Anchorage Daily News and The Seattle Times, with support from the Pulitzer Center’sPICK CREEK — In mid-July, sockeye poured into this stream, skittering through the shallows balanced on their bellies as their backs thrust out of the water.
The Bristol Bay sockeye spend much of their lives in the Bering Sea, and studies have found that they generally do better in years when water temperatures climb a few degrees Fahrenheit. During the past decade, which has included marine heat waves in 2018 and 2019, sockeye, though smaller in size, stormed Bristol Bay in a series of big runs. This year’s return smashed the previous high set only last year.
They are also grappling with another question in a century of intensifying climate change stoked by human activities that release greenhouse gases: Will it eventually get too warm, and undermine the extraordinary productivity of Bristol Bay sockeye? The pace of this warming could have huge consequences for the world’s largest harvest of wild sockeye, which has emerged as a global model of a sustainable salmon fishery.
This year, the sheer scale of the harvest — unfolding amid the COVID-19 pandemic and global supply chain disruptions — intensified the seasonal challenges of the annual mobilization. Processors flew in thousands of workers and contracted with an armada of vessels, ranging from World War II-era scows to Bering Sea crab boats, to ferry the fish back to the plants.
The best single haul of his career was on the previous night, when gusty winds prompted some fishermen to set anchor. Fourtner encountered what he described as a “wall of fish” as some 2,000 sockeye hit his net. Fourtner now works as a sales rep for a marine engine manufacturer while fishing summers in Bristol Bay. Last winter he also found time to overhaul his 1991 aluminum fishing boat in his garage. He rechristened it Twin Tuition in hopes it would help pay the college bills for his daughters, now 9 and already eager for their first stint fishing.
The volatile mix of big loads of fish and bouts of rough weather can have grave consequences. This summer, at least four boats were lost — although none, as in some years past, resulted in loss of life.His boat was drifting toward a boundary line, beyond which it would be in an illegal zone and subject to a fine. To speed things up, the crew pulled in the net without first picking out many salmon. This created a big, heavy pile in the stern.
Through most of June and all of July, this is where fleet operations manager Benson tried to puzzle together how to keep fish flowing into the Trident shore operation as well as a floating processor — or when the volume became too great, into more distant plants on the Alaska Peninsula. This task was complicated by big tides, which at a low ebb could make river channels impassable and sometimes even forestall offloading fish.
At Trident, some 400 men and women pulled marathon 16-hour daily shifts to keep pace with the processing of the salmon stowed in a long row of chilled tanks, each of which can hold 49,000 pounds of fish. In the 1940s, when the catch dipped as low as 4.7 million salmon, the gargantuan scale of 2022′s summer harvest would have seemed like the stuff of science fiction.
This has enabled generations of scientists and students — based out of a network of backcountry camps — to produce a remarkable long-term documentation of the freshwater ecosystem that sustains the sockeye. Students examine small fish from Lake Aleknagik on July 20 at a University of Washington Alaska Salmon Program research facility. From left: graduate student Brian Zhang, student Alex Coenen, research technician Henry Gould and students Jada Rasmussen, Juno O’Neill, Liz Voytas and Natalee Bozzi.
Ed Farley, an Alaska-based federal scientist, helped to pioneer the study of Bristol Bay sockeye in a series of research cruises in the southeastern Bering Sea between 2001 and 2015. He sampled the fish during their crucial first year in saltwater when they must grow fast and accumulate fat to survive the winter. His studies consistently found more young sockeye during years with warmer temperatures in the southeast Bering Sea than in cooler years.
In 2018, more than 5.5 billion hatchery salmon, mostly the fast-growing, short-lived pinks and chum, were released into the ocean — a more-than-ninefold jump from the 1960s, according to Greg Ruggerone, a Seattle-based fishery scientist who has studied both freshwater and ocean salmon for decades. Daniel Schindler holds a female salmon that had its eggs ripped out by a brown bear in Pick Creek on July 21. During periods of abundance, bears will sometimes"high-grade" salmon, eating only the eggs from the females and brains from the males. In July 2019, a heat wave hit Bristol Bay that offered a stark foreshadowing of the kind of summers that could become the norm later in this century.
In July, Sofia Dixon , Cecilia White and Eliza Williamson pick fish from a setnet off Pederson Point near Naknek on Bristol Bay as part of Liz Moore’s team. Dixon is co-director of a performing-arts organization in New York, White is a geologist and science writer, and Williamson is an architect. But climate models forecast that the warming periods in both the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea will become more frequent and severe as the ocean absorbs more heat amid the buildup of atmospheric greenhouse gases.
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